10 Movies That Wanted You To HATE The Hero
These movies dared you to root for characters you probably loathed.
The overwhelming majority of movies want to give audiences a likeable, sympathetic hero they can easily root for all the way to the finish line. After all, it's a crowd-pleasing formula that clearly works.
Yet not all filmmakers are quite so eager to cling to cinematic convention, and sometimes they want to challenge viewers by making them think about exactly who they're cheering on.
These 10 movies, across a multitude of genres, all offered up "heroes" - a pretty broad use of the term in some cases, admittedly - who we as viewers were encouraged to absolutely despise.
Whether their personalities were vile, their views were unconscionable, or they did things that no hero should conceivably do, they all tested the bounds of what audiences will root for.
In some instances the balance was clearly tipped too far and the film suffered for it, while in others they found a sweet spot where viewers could acknowledge the hero was a flawed person while still pulling for them to succeed.
Sometimes it just takes an a**hole to get the job done, as these 10 movies apparently prove...
10. Scott Pilgrim - Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World
If the marketing for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World painted Michael Cera's title character as an easily affable slacker musician fending off his new girlfriend's "evil" exes, the reality of the movie proper is quite different.
Basically, Scott Pilgrim is an a**hole, and Edgar Wright pulls no punches with this throughout the film.
Even if you're fine with 22-year-old Scott dating 17-year-old high-schooler Knives Chau (Ellen Wong), there's the fact that Scott then cheats on Knives with Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Instead).
Beyond that, he refuses to accept his myriad personal flaws and displays a patent lack of respect for both others - even his own bandmates - and himself.
But to be clear, this isn't a narrative failing in any way: the entire point of Scott's character arc throughout the movie is that he's a lazy, narcissistic "Nice Guy" who comes to appreciate the error of his ways and begins a journey of self-improvement.
Yet of course, that doesn't mean we immediately forgive or forget what he's done, and so audiences may leave the movie still feeling pretty iffy about Scott.